By Robert C. Koehler

April 16, 2010 "Buzzflash" -- What I thought
of, straight off, as I watched that Wikileaks Reveals Video Showing US Air Crew

Shooting Down Iraqi Ci... of Iraqis – including a Reuters photographer and his
driver – being strafed on a Baghdad street in 2007 by a U.S.
helicopter, was a book of postcards published a decade ago.

The book, compiled by James Allen, is called Sanctuary" href="http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/">Without Sanctuary.
My guess is that you don’t have it sitting on your coffee table. The
postcards and various other stained, frayed photographs –- about a
hundred of them –- depict mostly black men, a few women, a few white
men, in the process or aftermath of being lynched in the United States,
in the first half of the 20th century. The dangling or burned corpses
are surrounded, in most of the pictures, by grim or smirking or
benevolently smiling onlookers, some of them children. It’s the most
surreal and troubling historical document I’ve ever seen in my life.

It’s a stark testimony to the devaluation of human life, and this is its thread of commonality with the video, which –- justify it if you will in the name
of war, rail as Defense Secretary Gates did that it’s “out of context”
–- records helicopter crewmen chuckling in exaltation as they kill a
dozen people (“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards.”), including the
driver of a van who was trying to rescue one of the wounded.

When ground troops discover two wounded children in the van, which had been taken out with armor-piercing shells (“Look at that, right through the windshield.”),
one of the helicopter crewmen comments: “Well, it’s their fault for
bringing their kids to a battle.”

This is where the frame freezes for me, and I remain stuck, churning in my own outrage and despair just as I have –- and so many millions of Americans have –-
since the war on terror was launched amid all its lies and cowardly
righteousness in 2001. For God’s sake, we’re killing people. We’re doing
so in large numbers, with high-tech savagery. We aren’t even defending
ourselves. We’ve invented an enemy out of whole cloth.

We’re . . . killing . . . people.

But it didn’t matter then and it doesn’t matter now. Those who defend this war, or war in general –- or the infinitesimal slice of war depicted in the
WikiLeaks video -– have an endless supply of rationalizations that only
make sense within a heavily fortified consciousness: a consciousness
unable or afraid to cross the line demarking us and them, to ask,
fleetingly, “What if those ‘dead bastards’ were my parents, my brothers,
my children?”

Ask that and things start to change. It’s called empathy. Embrace it and you can no longer tolerate war –- not this kind of war, modern, impersonal, fought
from above –- as a way to advance the interests of business and empire,
or to make a geopolitical statement. If too many people cross that line,
it’s a big problem for the war economy. This is “Vietnam syndrome”
redux. The original took a generation to expunge. The powers that be,
who took a big hit with the Abu Ghraib torture photos, certainly don’t
want a leaked, decrypted video to undo all that meticulous planning.

The media that supported the war on terror at the outset continue, helpfully, to cover all matters related to it with their empathy meters set at zero. In so
doing, they, and the dispassionate experts whose quotes they solicit,
are able to coax many guilt-stricken and confused patriots back to
psychological safety.

The New York Times, ever the leader in this effort, Iraq Airstrike Video" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/world... some psychologists to “explain” the video: “You don’t want combat soldiers to be foolish or to jump the gun, but their job is
to destroy the enemy, and one way they’re able to do that is to see it
as a game, so that the people don’t seem real,” said Army psychologist
Bret A. Moore.

And thus those viewers of the video who were shocked to discover just how real and unpretty war is can relax and recover from their empathy attack. War is a
game, see? These guys were doing their jobs. All the way up the chain
of command, they’re just doing their jobs. And mainstream journalists
will continue to describe those jobs unquestioningly within the
parameters of the game.

Thus Yochi J. Dreazen, writing in the Strategy" href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230460..., explains that “Defense Secretary Robert Gates said civilian casualties in Afghanistan were posing a strategic challenge to
U.S. battlefield success there. . . .” Dead Afghan
civilians are “a problem.” They make other Afghans angry and then they
join the enemy. One of the “problems” Dreazen’s story referenced was the
Evidence

in Botched Raid" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/... last February in Gardez, in which five
civilians, including two pregnant women, were killed during a raid on
what turned out to be a baby shower. The Americans, apparently realizing
they’d screwed up, tried to give themselves deniability in the killings
by digging their bullets out of some of the corpses, witnesses said. At
least it wasn’t caught on video.

While the war on terror, or whatever it’s called in the Obama era, will grind someday to a shameful halt, I despair that there’s no stopping the next one. The
occasional graphic video is no match for a media establishment with
empathy meters set at zero.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his
Web site at commonwonders.com.)